Saturday, April 26, 2014

I tell ya, I don't get no respect

- by New Deal democrat
Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider writes that:

[T]here are lots of different ways to measure housing (price, inventory, new home sales, existing home sales, etc.) ....

As Bill McBride at Calculated Risk pointed out in a must-read post this week, the biggest part of the existing home sales decline is due to a drop in distressed housing sales (fewer and fewer firesales as a result of stretched homeowners) while the percentage of sales that are conventional is on the rise. So this is a good sign.

And even new home sales/housing starts (which are off to a sluggish start this year) should be up nicely for the year as a whole.

And he concludes:

Numbers remain generally up (the numbers that really matter, anyway)....

Seriously, Joe? Housing starts don't matter? New home sales don't matter? While starts typically follow the pattern for permits by a month or two (so I am expecting a big YoY gain in starts next month, given their horrible April 2013 number, and as they catch up with permits), new home sales are just as leading as housing permits.

And the piece Joe cites from Bill McBride was written the day before the awful March new home sales came out.

Here we are, 1/4 of the way through 2014, literally every metric is down YoY except permits, the concerns are sufficient enough that the title of Joe's piece is Is it Time to Freak Out about Housing? and his only cite is to the forecast of an average monthly gain of 20% YoY. How's that working out so far?

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